Sound

Status:

Current

The Sound Research Group is a working group to focus on the what and why of sound art through critical discussion, collaborations, presentation of works in progress, and public events. For more information: http://research.eyebeam.org/sound

Some Assumptions-- The Sound Research Group provides a valuable forum to reflect on the what and the why of sound art practice. -- Both theory and practice around sound work are now more widely recognized by the larger art world and public.-- Sound is still marginalized in comparison to visual arts (ie, lack of shared vocabulary, lack of established theory, lack of consideration in video work, few agreed upon presentation methods, etc).

Goal With the above in mind, we want to tackle, discuss, debate, and create new ways of thinking about and presenting sound practice.

it’s late, and theyre making me write something…
If, as Bifo says, “The idea that the future will be better than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of the bourgeois production model” and yet we have watched the horizon of the future crumble into the network, as (smart) dust, a layer that receives impressions but no deeper, then, (like the songs by YACHT) Utopia and Dystopia are now one, and the old bourgeois production model is over. It has been superseded by consumption on the level of gesture, to ‘like’, to tweet, to vibrate, co-mimesis between body and image, data and action, through reflexivity and recursion. Network protocols have become means of social control. By whom? A central authority? Or by the mass of impassioned churn itself?

NEW WORK: Eternal Portraits
Facebook uses face recognition software to identify its users in photos. This works via a ‘template’ of your facial features that is created from your profile images. These features — the distance between your eyes, the symmetry of your mouth — generally do not change over time. Unlike a photograph, which captures some ephemeral expression of who you are at a particular moment, a face recognition template forever remains your portrait.